Last year I heard several times that marketers would not be business minded enough.  Well, I am happy to see in the YMS 2013 results that 67% believes that they can prove their added value by aligning business and marketing objectives.  Yes, we are on the right track, I hear you think?

No, not all is rosy.  There are still several steps to be taken: it seems that marketers look a lot at the past in order to improve, but are they looking enough in the present and the future? I don’t think so.  Only 45% uses customer satisfaction as a metric, so lot’s of opportunity left to look at the present.  And what about the future?  Yes, I am pretty sure you all watch trends, the one more structured than the other.  But who is looking at the future to cover (unexpected) risks?  Not many marketers: “no, let’s leave that up to the finance or data department”…

This is a call upon all of you: as marketers we need to prepare ourselves to be more ‘agile’ by identifying risks, modeling them, taking them into account in business cases and for scenario analysis and finally by developing go-to-market plans that take these risks into account.  Marketing and business will be even more aligned!